,IC, THE 1HEATItE -, !!.:f?1 $, O: ! .I': ' MISS HeLLMAN NODS 42 I HAVE to say that Lillian Hellman, for a long time a considerable en- thusiasm of mine, has written what to me looks like a pretty bad play in ("The Searching Wind," now at the Fulton. Reliable authorities tell me that Miss Hellman has purposely abandoned her usual precision of construction in order to deal more convincingly with ideas. There can be no question, I guess, that she is not as concerned with form as she has been in the past, since "The -Searching Wind," generally speaking, is as loose as a haystack, but the gain may be debatable. It is a play alternating or combining, or perhaps just mixing up, love and politics, but I am far from sure that Miss Hellman has anything espe- cially new or valuable to say about either one. Politically, as presumably every- body knows, this playwright is an ad- vanced or i1!dignant woman, and her theory this time seems to be that there was something shameful in anyone's failure to grasp at once the full implica- tions of M ussolini' s march on Rome. On this subject, I can't help feeling that social omniscience is the property of the very few and that when Miss Hell- man's hero, in 1 922, remarked that the I talians were Inerely exchanging one bad gang for another, he was just in- terpreting the available facts in terms of the most prevalent, if not the most enlightened, American opinion of the time. .i\.s a diplomat (and as a character in one of Miss Hellman's plays), Alex- ander Hazen, which happens to have been this character's name, perhaps should have realized that the beginning of Fascism meant the end of the world, but I doubt that the nature of total gov- ernment, which had not yet taken any identifiable shape, was then clear to any- body except possibly Ernest Heming- way, a man very closely in touch with God. Anyway, Miss Hellman starts her play chronologically with the capitula- tion of Rome and ends it in Washing- ton in 1 944. (The action in time goes back and forth, but these are the limiting dates.) At this latter date, Mr. Hazen's son, wounded in Italy, is at home and ((Do you thi,rtk I 8'rtjOY fi,rtdzYlg fault?" in what seems to me a very intemperate mood. He says that he is ashamed of his father for his behavior in Rome, for his behavior at the time of the Munich sell- out (when, as ambassador to France, he sent home a report recommending that concessions to Germany end with the Sudetenland but adding that Mr. Chamberlain should not be blamed too strongly for hoping for peace in our time), and ashamed of his mother for entertaining a bunch of fashionable ex- iles. This young man has lost a leg and most of his friends on the Anzio beach- head, but it is still possible that his con- versation is more a reflection of Miss Hellman's general impatience with, or contempt for, people less elaborately in- formed than herself than any reproduc- tion of conceivable human speech. He is the author talking, and more trans- parently than is generally considered permissible in art. Considering it sheer- ly as theatre, I think Miss Hellman has presented her problem in such special or knowledgeable terms that the audi- ence is never precisely sure where its sympathies are supposed to lie. It is frequently very interesting and eloquent writing, but I suspect it defeats itself by a too subtle shading of character, an error that has overtaken notable play- wrights before, specifically Mr. S. N. Behrman. Out of Miss Hellman's love affair, I can make little or nothing. There are two girls who for twenty years appear to have been in love with the same man. One (Cornelia Otis Skinner) marries him; the other (Barbara O'N eil) meets him for lunch or dinner every now and then, and on these occasions love is hotly discussed, though nothing much is ever done about it. In the end, it turns out that Miss O'Neil keeps putting in her singularly antiseptic appearances-she shows up in Rome, Berlin, Paris, and Washington-almost entirely for the purpose of annoying Miss Skinner, whom she dislikes for stealing her beau and also maybe for being rich and secure and entertaining ladies like Elsa Max- well. A young woman who ought to know assures me that this sort of con- duct is entirely possible in her sex, but it is outside my experience, and the girls' reiterated meetings all over the world began to look silly to me around the middle of the second act, leaving the management with a frivolous spectator on its hands, clearly no man to be at- tending a serious play. The reason for the presence of these two essentially unrelated themes in "The Searching Wind" is a mystery to me. As a rule, Miss Hellman's works are highly keyed-any character in them is